Polly and Her Pals — January 27, 1922

Four panels follow Polly's mother admiring a new silk dress — "Ain't my new dress a peach, Polly?" — while Polly and an unnamed figure echo "Wonderful!" The punchline arrives when Ma marvels that such a gorgeous garment could come from "a insignificant lil worm," prompting Polly to cry "Why! Ma!!" and a seated figure to deadpan: "What a horrid thing to say about Pa!" Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, eventually syndicating it nationally. His Sunday pages became renowned for bold Art Deco geometry and Cubist-inflected backgrounds. The strip exemplifies the daily newspaper comic as the direct ancestor of the comic book — recurring characters, sequential panels, and expressive speech balloons refined into a coherent visual language.